Know Your Opponents

The best chance of victory comes from knowing your own team, but knowing your opponent's strengths and weaknesses can help you better prepare for matches with one-off Training sessions.

Your scouts will usually look at your opponents, but you can request a specific report any time. Simply go to any team page for a team that's in your league, and you'll see a button near the top-left corner that reads "Get Team Report." You can request a specific scout to check them out, and you'll get the report in a single day.

The team report is multi-faceted and divided into several pages. You'll get season stats and facts, the team's depth chart and its player status, and more. You won't get detailed information on individual players (unless you manually request Player Scouting), but you can still form a strategy.

For example, take a look at the goals report for Guangdong Rizhiquan here. They're a generally decent club that scores more goals than they allow, except in the last 15 minutes. That's when they seem to falter, allowing 11 goals in 18 matches within that time frame. That could be an indicator that their players (or at least their defenders) have bad stamina and can't handle the full 90 minutes. We could focus on attacking, and try to run their players ragged early, giving us a better chance to score toward the end of the match! Also, we see that most of their assists come from the midfield or right flank, so we can favor those sections for our defense to concentrate on. Finally, they've given up a lot of assists on their left defensive flank, which means we should favor that flank as we come down the field to attack.

The team report also provides Formation information, and comparisons between the opponent's depth chart versus yours. Just remember that if any player on one team is on the left side of the pitch, he'll be facing the opposite-sided player on the opponents. That is, your left defender will generally face the opponent's right midfielder and striker.